Diablo® III

01/21/2013 09:34 AMPosted by Technoviking

economy/crafting isnt an MMO pillar. it is a byproduct of a well-designed MMO. The 3rd pillar is clearly story driven lore.

Lore and story is part of pve.

symantecs at this point--point well received tho.

01/21/2013 09:10 AMPosted by Technoviking

Where is this world going if this aggressive, slimy, mass profit-centric mentality dominates the marketplace? this cannot be sustainable. Can others not see this???

I totally agree with you. I try to buy locally sourced products (especially food), be a patron of local shops and bars that aren't chains, and my wife owns her own business. I make my own beer. But for something like a video game that requires a lot of time, overhead, and manpower to create, I somewhat expect there to be corporate trappings.

All companys change over time it just happens. The biggest dissapointment to me from blizzard is the way they treat and communicate with the community now. Any in game tickets are auto response and it honestly seems like they wait for you to be offline when they reply these days(atleast for wow i havent made a ticket or report for d3 yet). Usually the reply is owell were not going to help. Ive even seen screen shots and have heard of many many instances where they reply to tickets and have the persons name and/or character name wrong. From what ive seen on the d3 forums a blue comes and chimes in on a topic one time and never comes back to that thread even if his response made it worse, even the wow forums still somehow have blues sometimes having conversations with numerous replys. also from what ive seen any topic that has pretty much anything to do with jay wilsom or the pardo guy gets deleted sometimes for no reason. In my honest opinion blizzard(or just maybe the diablo section of them) do not care about the diablo community at all they just want to keep their income from the RMAH flowing. Bots and dupes go this long without a serious ban hammer?? they probably figure owell we get more RMAH transaction fees.

Blizzard is still one of the best developers out there. Have they made mistakes with DiabloIII? We all know the answer to that. But they do care enough to keep working at it. I don't know any other company that continues to support their games for as long as Blizzard does.

Valve would be the closest, but still fall short of Blizzard in that respect. I really think revamping the skill system in D3 would fix the game for the most part.

Allow us a skill tree that lets us invest points into skills to make them more powerful (ala. D2)
and redo the Skill Runes, then allow 2 runes on each skill... so we can customize our builds more.

Blizzard is not the company that it once represented. I have enjoyed all blizzard titles since inception. I am a 31 year old gamer that has played video games all my life spanning all the early pc/console cycles to current gen PC. Blizzard has sold out period. the day they decided to focus attention on cornering the market and mass profit mechanisms is when the decline commenced.

Blizzard has sunken into the realm of corporate mentality profit driven ego centric elitists. The disconnect between Blizz upper management and their consumers has become ENORMOUS. Blizz simply spins issues in a light that seems logical and interesting and executes them completely different. From your awful WoW built in customer support system prerendering generic ticket responses, to your D3 CMs with their "damage control PR mode vanilla non fact revealing" responses on these forums--the lack of transparency is crippling.

You people decided to take the greedy road over the road of quality competant games. I saw a lot of this nonsense when activision got their hands in. Bobby Kotick is textbook for "mass profit mechanism snake oil salesman" style games. I understand you are in it for profit--but the line must be drawn somewhere. Less worry about shareholder quarterly statements and more on QUALITY game /franchise improvements would go a long way. Seek our feedback instead of the "ignore and redirect complete media blackout" campaign you love to use so often. Maybe then you can revive your diehard fans and re-gain the respectand admiration this community once had for the company!

**All the information that I listed is my own opinion. I do not want blizzard to fail, I WANT THEM TO SUCCEED! However, I feel that if drastic measures are not taken then blizzard's consumers will eventually see the disconnect/greed and simply stop buying their products.

tldr if you understood what they actually put into making d3 or any game for that matter you would understand why it takes so long bug fixes etc have to be tested as well as public test servers etc

honestly though if i remember right there was a d2 ladder season once where it started with 80% bots maybe more and they reset the ladder and did a ban on the bots extreamly early. I could be wrong but if i am correct about this what does that say about their view on bots in d3?

01/21/2013 10:06 AMPosted by fanwaz

honestly though if i remember right there was a d2 ladder season once where it started with 80% bots maybe more and they reset the ladder and did a ban on the bots extreamly early. I could be wrong but if i am correct about this what does that say about their view on bots in d3?

This is actually a topic of interest to me, because I play completely legit (I don't even use legal exploits) and bots are a huge turnoff to me.

In hindsight, I see the reason why we have such a bot problem is two-fold. First, it's way to easy to bot gold for ever and ever. Second, MP levels decreased the difficulty so dramatically, and you can find every piece of gear this game has to offer on MP0. That makes botting for items super easy not to mention thousands of times more efficient than what a player can do.

In order to combat bots the game needs to be designed specifically with bots in mind. That means you can't have a currency like gold. Currency needs to stay item-based and have multiple levels of progression. Of course, that doesn't stop bots from botting at lower/mid-tier levels, so randomization is a huge part of the game as well. Each map needs to be randomly generated with 100s of different combinations, and bosses/superuniques need to spawn in lots of different places. Although this would go a long ways towards stopping bots, I'm thinking there would need to be even more put in place such as captchas (which I HATE with a fervent passion).

Don't know, don't care. I liked some of their games and some I haven't. I never held them as some infallible entity. If they aren't the same company they used to be and can't put out the same quality of games then that's cool. There's plenty of other people making amazing games to fill their proverbial shoes so it's no great loss to gaming if they've changed.

Not saying they have or have not. It doesn't matter to me.

zaxxon the only problem i see with maps being randomly generated with lots of combos is in d2 they had map hack, of course it wouldnt be as good now since people dont rush through the levels of a tower or catacomb to reach a boss now. Odds are there is probably another version for d3 and if not i can see it coming very soon.

hey they still make pc games most game makers moved on and just port consoles over. I give them credit.

The TS is spot on imo.

01/21/2013 10:21 AMPosted by Aimless

hey they still make pc games most game makers moved on and just port consoles over. I give them credit.

Yeah that makes me sad. I miss the days of the small-midsize companies churning out cool PC stuff in the 90's and early 2000's. At least there's an indie craze right now, but meh, the greatest games were made by AAA studios that were smaller, like Blizz North and Blizz itself back in the day. I think if you're too small you can't execute your vision, and if you're too big then you don't have a dedicated/passionate worker-base (becomes too corporate?).

Although Valve's seemed to wade through the waters decently.

In order to combat bots the game needs to be designed specifically with bots in mind. That means you can't have a currency like gold. Currency needs to stay item-based and have multiple levels of progression.

This is the problem with most ideas to combat bots. In order to make the game bot-unfriendly, you also have to make it very inconvenient for humans.

Also: D2 had an item-trade-based economy and yet bots still ran rampant.

to sort of re-rail this thread...

I LIKE blizzard. I like their products. I enjoy playing D3, even in it's arguably lackluster state. What I take issue with is the clear shift of the company's priorities. It seems they rather focus on pay to win models, sub fees and microtransactions rather than inspiring to release original material like they used to. They lack any and all transparency. Their community interaction is abysmal. They are too far removed from their products. I question whether or not they even play the same games as us. They can still reclaim the glory of old and release fun, innovative products while making record profits!! It can work both ways. Blizz has to recognize this. Why don't they act??

01/21/2013 10:36 AMPosted by Mysorona

This is the problem with most ideas to combat bots. In order to make the game bot-unfriendly, you also have to make it very inconvenient for humans.

Indeed. I actually find my comment humorous because on the other hand I'd love to ditch the rmah and have purely a currency exchange! Funny how a great idea is completely countered by bots and the steps that need to be taken against them.

01/21/2013 10:36 AMPosted by Mysorona

Also: D2 had an item-trade-based economy and yet bots still ran rampant.

D2's bot problem was far and beyond the issue of gold vs item-based currency. Static bosses/superuniques, very limited randomization (most dungeons only had 3-5 "random" maps), teleport given to the most powerful characters thanks to enigma. That's really only the tip of the iceberg of bot-friendly gameplay options in D2.

That's why I discussed further steps such as extreme randomization and captcha.

So then you really believe that Activision told Blizz to make sure that this game sucks lemons. So a game that sucks lemons would sell millions. I mean one that was designed to suck lemons. Also why did Blizz bother to fix this game?

That is because unlike most companies that would cut and run after they got a huge profits. Blizz is continually fixing and improving their games. That is their hallmark, because as Mike has said Blizz has never released a perfect game. Jay and IIRC even his crew agreed that Blizz is in it for the long haul.

you missed my points. I was referring to blizz as a whole entity--not d3 specific only. I am concerned with the direction they are heading as a company.

Oh I get it now, then you say that Activision said we must make sure that all of our games suck lemons big time. Where they suck so bad that nobody wants them huh.

Where is your head, game companies have to make games that are both fun and profitable.
With a game that sucks lemons no one would buy them.

So are you saying that Activision hates making money. Okay if that is what you are saying, that they are telling their shareholders that they do not want to make any more profits. I wonder though how their shareholders will take it. Because the CEO in any company has only one fiduciary responsibility, legal responsibility, and that is to increase their shareholders value. They will not do it if all of their games suck lemons.

to sort of re-rail this thread...

I LIKE blizzard. I like their products. I enjoy playing D3, even in it's arguably lackluster state. What I take issue with is the clear shift of the company's priorities. It seems they rather focus on pay to win models, sub fees and microtransactions rather than inspiring to release original material like they used to. They lack any and all transparency. Their community interaction is abysmal. They are too far removed from their products. I question whether or not they even play the same games as us. They can still reclaim the glory of old and release fun, innovative products while making record profits!! It can work both ways. Blizz has to recognize this. Why don't they act??

Come on what do you win in this game by buying your gear with real money? What a PvP match, really, are you saying with all of the months that we have been waiting for PvP. That no one else has either gotten their gear by finding it. Getting it from others in coop through trading, or from the gold auction house. I say that there is no doubt more players that have done the above than those that have bought their gear through the RMAH. Also the amount of money that it makes in profits is not nearly as much as what they get each month from all of their other games.

I guess that fun for you is a game that has very little to no challenge. One where you can very easily way out level and way out gear the content. In WoW it would be the equivalent of being able to take level 50 gear, blues and greens, and beating a heroic level 90 raid boss.

31 years of age and still doesn't know how to cope? Try not to be so pathetic.